So I'm sure you've seen people build them on youtube. it's usually some guy in a european country. There's one channel where the guy is building a bunch of scaled down remakes (whitewater, world cup soccer 94, medievel madness). You know what sort of sucks about all those projects? You'll never get to play them, and you'll probably never get to build one yourself. Think about it, every time you see someone build one, what's missing from you building one too? The mechs. Yea, nobody is making half scale mechs, nobody is even sharing their CAD designs. I've pondered designing one for years, always thinking "man, it's going to be tough to scale everything down".. Everything from mechs, to even the hardware and and thicknesses in general all scaling in half. This week I've done some designing and now that I'm confident it will work I've bought some parts (small 12v solenoids, buttons, some UHMW for the side rails, some dowel pins for the flipper bat shafts). I plan to get flippers working, then I've got a design in mind for the slings. Eventually I'll get to gobble holes, VUKs, pop bumpers but for now I just want to get a game flipping (make sure the solenoids I picked can launch a ball up a playfield and up a ramp).
If it works well, I'd like to share the designs (since EVERYONE seems to have a 3d printer these days). I think it would be so neat if I kicked off a whole new homebrew genre where people are bringing mini pinball games to shows, maybe even get kids interested in making their own (I think a half scale pinball is far more manageable than a full scale 220lb pinball machine).
Why do I want to start one now? Well, it's small and light.. it takes up very little space (something I don't have a lot of at the moment).. I could build it, and it could literally get stored in a closet. I just finished a side project at work for a trade-show display (not pinball related, but still a lot of work building a box with lights and relays and water pumps). One of our team members jokes about a pinball machine themed around our business for the booth, to which I informed him just how tied I am into pinball. He's the sort of person that never really follows through on anything (IE likes to spout off ideas, but never wants to execute them). So I'm just going to build one and surprise him (and my boss). Building it half scale makes it VERY shippable. Like no freight for sure, in fact at half scale I may even get it down to carry-on luggage size and weight.
Right now here's a rough layout. I'm printing flipper parts as we speak, should get my components from Amazon tomorrow then I'm going to try wiring up the flippers and see how it does.
